cant say enough about my hydra chiller. with well water, took 6 gals wort from boiling to 60F in under 5 minutes, then recirculation in ice cooler and dropped to pitch temp of 47F in 3 minutes.
great time saver and great water waste reduction.
I’ve been eyeballing the King Cobra for my wide stockpot. The price tag is a bit much at the moment (unemployed in grad school) but seems totally worth it versus the cost of other chilling systems.
Right now chilling is the weakest link in my system.
After a clogged run off yesterday with my IC Whirlpool set up, I just ordered a Hydra.
How wide is your kettle, Ken? Do you have a diptube?
14" diameter, 18" deep stainless. Plenty of room to drop hydra in and use it to stir wort…that drops temp the fastest. No dip tube- I’ve always siphoned after true settles.
I love my hydra, too. My only drawback thus far is that I would love to buy one of these filters to sit on the side of my kettle for adding pellet hops, which would work initially, but when you add the chiller for the last 15 minutes of the boil, the filter would have to get yanked. Which defeats the purpose of late boil hop additions.
Anyone overcome this problem for us immersion chiller users? I still use hop bags for pellets, but find myself questioning their efficiency in delivering hoppy goodness. Because of that, I mostly use leaf hops, but they sure do take up a lot of space in my freezer (when you buy them by the pound).
Are you talking about a hop spider,Chumley? I bought my SS hop spider sized (www.stainlessbrewing.com) to fit the ID of my old school IC. Don’t know the dimensions of the hydra, though.
I have one of the “side filters”. Essentially it is just a large stainless mesh cylindar, with two hooks on it to hold onto the lip of the pot. Starting out, I just moved it to hook onto the coil instead of the lip of the pot.
The strainer I use is this one:
Yes, the side filter is what I was looking at. I didn’t think of picking it up and attaching it to the immersion chiller during the last 15 minutes of the boil. That may work!